Symphonie Lumineuse condensed into a project two years after the success of the ice innukshuk project. I wanted to build a winter art sculpture that would add colour to a seemly endless black-and-white Montreal winter. The goal was to freeze hundreds of ice blocks, surround them with colourful LEDs and light up the night. I enlisted the help of some amazing people and we put in a proposal for Nuit Blanche. The simple sketch to cajole some friends to helping is included below.
We found a place called Parc LaFontainte that generously allowed us to use their space and more importantly had a hose on site. To make the ice blocks we collected 2L milk or juice cartons. Each ice pillar would take about 100 blocks and I ( for some weird reason) decided to make 5 of them. In case your math is poor that is 500 2L blocks. To collect them we went through the neigbourhood’s recycling on recycling day. The collection was more difficult as each morning we’d wake up early before the sun, put on our gloves and brave the cold to break through recycling bags for the cartons inside. More than once a homeless person questioned me loudly telling me this is his territory only to explain what we were collecting. After disbelief and a bit of a show-and-tell he thought we were crazy and we both parted ways. People also don’t tend to clean their cartons so we also needed to clean them as well.
At the end of January it got cold enough to freeze. We needed about two days of -10C weather and we froze about 100 blocks to try to build a test pillar. Unfortunately the day after we got higher than expected weather in Montreal causing all the iceblocks to be wasted. What happened was on the first day the water froze around the edges of the carton and left the inside liquid.It wasn’t cold enough to freeze all the way through. It warmed up and then cooled down after. When it cooled down the water inside the carton froze, expanded and then broke the carton. When it warmed up again the ice block melted and the water escaped through the hole. It was weird checking on the blocks on the cold day and only finding half melted blocks.
To fix this problem we needed at least two cold days of weather and as we all worked it needed to happen on the weekend as well.
A little bit into February 2017 two weeks before Nuit Blanche I saw cold weather and decided to go all in a freeze all the blocks. In total we froze about 500 blocks.
The electronics were also new to me as I had no idea what was going to happen at minus -20C and below temperature. We built some wooden boxes and planned to put a IR sensor to sense movement and do a light show every 30 minutes. I used a Raspberry Pi, some LED lights from Adafruit and an IR sensor to measure distance and movement.
As luck wouldn’t have it, the temperature warmed up to +10C the week before Nuit Blanche. The block were already frozen and there was no option except to hope they would last. We frantically built the entire day and by the time the night drooped it all five pillars were complete. The electronics were in and everything worked perfectly. The light show was amazing and each pillar was the size of a person. Some videos are below.
The next day I was terribly sick and had a bad cold. A friend checked up on the pillars for me and told me they were all melted. I literally saw my hard work over the last two weeks melt before my eyes.
I had nothing to show except slush. I collected up the five electronic enclosures and took a disparaging taxi back home to sleep off my exhaustion and disappointment.
We didn’t have enough time to collect and freeze blocks so I was going to scramble to build some wooden structures instead. We build some fun and friendly robots and used see through coregated plastic to replicate the ice.
Things were now a scramble as I needed to get everything done very quickly.
It was +10 degrees the weekend before and about -30C the day of. We were in a park a ways away and not many people ventured so far to get into the park. The temperatures also caused the wireless to stop and I had a problem debugging any issues with the pillar. I didn’t do much marketing or promotion so the turnout wasn’t that good.
Many thanks to Evelyne Drouin aka DJ Mini for all help carving the sound landscape and correcting all my French prose, Nathanaël Lécaudé for finding the place to build at Parc LaFontaine and debugging Node-js, Colin Gallacher for buying the speaker and practical advice, Iris Godbout for her help with the proposal/planning and Imran Jameel for all the heavy lifting.